NFM 2019

11th Annual NASA Formal Methods Symposium (NFM 2019)

Challenges for Future Exploration

The widespread use and increasing complexity of mission-critical and safety-critical systems at NASA and in the aerospace industry require advanced techniques that address these systems' specification, design, verification, validation, and certification requirements. The NASA Formal Methods Symposium (NFM) is a forum to foster collaboration between theoreticians and practitioners from NASA, academia, and industry. NFM's goals are to identify challenges and to provide solutions for achieving assurance for such critical systems.

New developments and emerging applications like autonomous software for uncrewed deep space human habitats, caretaker robotics, Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), UAS Traffic Management (UTM), and the need for system-wide fault detection, diagnosis, and prognostics provide new challenges for system specification, development, and verification approaches. The focus of these symposiums are on formal techniques and other approaches for software assurance, including their theory, current capabilities and limitations, as well as their potential application to aerospace, robotics, and other NASA-relevant safety-critical systems during all stages of the software life-cycle.

The NASA Formal Methods Symposium is an annual event organized by the NASA Formal Methods (NFM) Steering Committee, comprised of researchers spanning several NASA centers. NFM 2019 is being co-organized by Rice University and NASA- Johnson Space Center in Houston, TX.

The meeting will be comprised of invited talks by leading researchers and practitioners, a panel discussion on the challenges of future exploration that formal methods could address , and more specialized talks based on contributed papers.

Topics of Interest

We encourage submissions on cross-cutting approaches that bring together formal methods and techniques from other domains such as probabilistic reasoning, machine learning, control theory, robotics, and quantum computing among others.